Peter Mac News

Professor Dawson is a clinician-scientist at Peter Mac and Professor at the Centre for Cancer Research, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

She is the only Australian scientist included in the Mark Foundation’s latest round of ASPIRE grants.

ASPIRE grants support high-risk, high-reward projects that answer key feasibility and proof-of-concept questions in typically one year, and success can lead to more Mark Foundation funding.

“I am delighted to have The Mark Foundation’s support for this research which will improve blood tests, using a new approach developed at Peter Mac, to detect DNA fragments thrown off by tumours,” Prof Dawson says.

“These tests for ‘circulating tumour DNA’ have many untapped applications and will be used here to track how patients’ cancers change over time and in response to treatment.

“This may help explain why metastatic cancers are harder to treat than primary tumours and, ultimately, point us to treatments that remain effective for longer.”

Since 2017, the US-based Mark Foundation has awarded more than USD $180 million to cancer scientists, initially in the US and now increasingly international.

Scientists in Australia (including at Peter Mac) received ASPIRE program funding for the first time in 2021, with Austria and Switzerland added for the first time in 2022.

“These ASPIRE grants will enable innovative approaches to solving challenges in multiple cancer types including small cell lung cancer, breast cancer, and glioblastoma,” said Ryan Schoenfeld, CEO of The Mark Foundation.

“The projects are at the forefront of diverse research areas such as chemical biology, cancer evolution, and cellular plasticity.

“We continue to increase our financial commitment globally to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the development of new cancer therapies.”

2022 ASPIRE grants:

• Sarah-Jane Dawson, MD, PhD, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, The University of Melbourne, Australia
  Circulating tumor DNA to serially assess in vivo transcriptional evolution in cancers
• Hans Clevers, MD, PhD, Hubrecht Institute (KNAW), Utrecht, Netherlands
  Modeling HBV-associated liver cancer with hepatocyte organoids
• Andreas Hottinger, MD, PhD, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), Lausanne, Switzerland, and Douglas Hanahan, PhD, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Lausanne and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
  A proof-of-concept clinical trial of an innovative new therapy for glioblastoma
• Johanna Joyce, PhD, University of Lausanne and Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Lausanne Branch, Switzerland
  Investigating the bacterial microbiome in brain metastasis
• Xiongbin Lu, PhD, Indiana University School of Medicine and Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, USA
  Reprograming Regulatory T Cells for Cancer Immunotherapy
• Trudy Oliver, PhD, and Baldomero Olivera, PhD, Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, USA
  Targeting small cell lung cancer plasticity with constellation pharmacology
• Mikko Taipale, PhD, Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Canada, Daniel Durocher, PhD and Frank Sicheri, PhD, Mount Sinai Hospital, Canada
  Development of a genetic platform for induced proximity therapeutics
• Georg Winter, PhD, CeMM - Research Center for Molecular Medicine, Vienna, Austria, and Steve Gygi, PhD, Harvard Medical School
  Hijacking immune-cell specific E3 ligases for targeted protein degradation

Learn more about the ASPIRE Awards here or visit www.TheMarkFoundation.org.